The New York Review of Books
New York: Sentimental Journeys
January 17, 1991
by Joan
Didion
1.
We know her story, and some of us, although not all of us, which was to become one of the story’s several
equivocal aspects, know her name. She was a twenty-nine-year-old unmarried white woman who worked
as an investment banker in the corporate finance department at Salomon Brothers in downtown Manhattan,
the energy and natural resources group. She was said by one of the principals in a Texas oil stock offering
on which she had collaborated as a member of the Salomon team to have done “top-notch” work. She lived
alone in an apartment on East 83rd Street, between York and East End, a sublet cooperative she was
thinking about buying. She often worked late and when she got home she would change into jogging
clothes and at eight-thirty or nine-thirty in the evening would go running, six or seven miles through
Central Park, north on the East Drive, west on the less traveled road connecting the East and West Drives at
approximately 102nd Street, and south on the West Drive. The wisdom of this was later questioned by
some, by those who were accustomed to thinking of the Park as a place to avoid after dark, and defended
by others, the more adroit of whom spoke of the citizen’s absolute right to public access (“That park
belongs to us and this time nobody is going to take it from us,” Ronnie Eldridge, at the time a Democratic
candidate for the City Council of New York, declared on the op-ed page of The New York Times), others of
whom spoke of “running” as a preemptive right. “Runners have Type A controlled personalities and they
don’t like their schedules interrupted,” one runner, a securities trader, told the Times to this point. “When
people run is a function of their life style,” another runner said. “I am personally very angry,” a third said,
“Because women should have the right to run any time.”
For this woman in this instance these notional rights did not prevail. She was found, with her
clothes torn off, not far from the 102nd Street connecting road at one-thirty on the morning of April 20,
1989. She was taken near death to Metropolitan Hospital on East 97th Street. She had lost 75 percent of her
blood. Her skull had been crushed, her left eyeball pushed back through its socket, the characteristic surface
wrinkles of her brain flattened. Dirt and twigs were found in her vagina, suggesting rape. By May 2, when
she first woke from coma, six black and Hispanic teenagers, four of whom had made videotaped statements
concerning their roles in the attack and another of whom had described his role in an unsigned verbal
statement, had been charged with her assault and rape and she had become, unwilling and unwitting, a
sacrificial player in the sentimental narrative that is New York public life.
NIGHTMARE IN CENTRAL PARK, the headlines and display type read. Teen Wolfpack Beats
and Rapes Wall Street Exec on Jogging Path. Central Park Horror. Wolf Pack’s Prey. Female Jogger Near
Death After Savage Attack by Roving Gang. Rape Rampage. Park Marauders Call It ‘Wilding,’ Street
Slang for Going Berserk. Rape Suspect: ‘It Was Fun.’ Rape Suspect’s Jailhouse Boast: ‘She Wasn’t
Nothing.’ The teenagers were back in the holding cell, the confessions gory and complete. One shouted “hit
the beat” and they all started rapping to “Wild Thing.” The Jogger and the Wolf Pack. An Outrage And A
Prayer. And, on the Monday morning after the attack, on the front page of The New York Post, with a
photograph of Governor Mario Cuomo and the headline NONE OF US IS SAFE, this italic text: “A visibly
shaken Governor Cuomo spoke out yesterday on the vicious Central Park rape: The people are angry and
frightened—my mother is, my family is. To me, as a person who’s lived in this city all of his life, this is the
ultimate shriek of alarm.’ ”
Later it would be recalled that 3,254 other rapes were reported that year, including one the
following week involving the near decapitation of a black woman in Fort Tryon Park and one two weeks
later involving a black woman in Brooklyn who was robbed, raped, sodomized, and thrown down the air
shaft of a four-story building, but the point was rhetorical, since crimes are universally understood to be
news to the extent that they offer, however erroneously, a story, a lesson, a high concept. In the 1986
Central Park death of Jennifer Levin, then eighteen, at the hands of Robert Chambers, then nineteen, the
“story,” extrapolated more or less from thin air but left largely uncorrected, had to do not with people living
wretchedly and marginally on the underside of where they wanted to be, not with the Dreiserian pursuit of
“respectability” that marked the revealed details (Robert Chambers’s mother was a private-duty nurse who
worked twelve-hour night shifts to enroll her son in private schools and the Knickerbocker Greys) but with
“preppies,” and the familiar “too much too soon.”
Susan Brownmiller, during a year spent monitoring newspaper coverage of rape as part of her
research for Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape, found, not surprisingly, that “although New York
City police statistics showed that black women were more frequent victims of rape than white women, the
favored victim in the tabloid headline…was young, white, middle-class and ‘attractive.’ ” In its quite
extensive coverage of rape-murders during the year 1971, according to Ms. Brownmiller, the Daily News
published in its four-star final edition only two stories in which the victim was not described in the lead
paragraph as “attractive”: one of these stories involved an eight-year-old child, the other was a second-day
follow-up on a first-day story which had in fact described the victim as “attractive.” The Times, she found,
covered rapes only infrequently that year, but what coverage they did “concerned victims who had some
kind of middle-class status, such as ‘nurse,’ ‘dancer’ or ‘teacher,’ and with a favored setting of Central
Park.”
As a news story, “Jogger” was understood to turn on the demonstrable “difference” between the
victim and her accused assailants, four of whom lived in Schomburg Plaza, a federally subsidized
apartment complex at the northeast corner of Fifth Avenue and 110th Street in East Harlem, and the rest of
whom lived in the projects and rehabilitated tenements just to the north and west of Schomburg Plaza.
Some twenty-five teenagers were brought in for questioning; eight were held. The six who were finally
indicted ranged in age from fourteen to sixteen. That none of the six had a previous police record passed, in
this context, for achievement; beyond that, one was recalled by his classmates to have taken pride in his
expensive basketball shoes, another to have been “a follower.” I’m a smooth type of fellow, cool, calm, and
mellow, one of the six, Yusef Salaam, would say in the rap he presented as part of his statement before
sentencing.
I’m kind of laid back, but now I’m speaking so that you know/I got used and abused and even was put on
the news….
I’m not dissing them all, but the some that I called
They tried to dis me like I was an inch small, like a midget, a mouse, something less than a man.
The victim, by contrast, was a leader, part of what the Times would describe as “the wave of
young professionals who took over New York in the 1980’s,” one of those who were “handsome and pretty
and educated and white,” who, according to the Times, not only “believed they owned the world” but “had
reason to.” She was from a Pittsburgh suburb, Upper St. Clair, the daughter of a retired Westinghouse
senior manager. She had been Phi Beta Kappa at Wellesley, a graduate of the Yale School of Management,
a Congressional intern, nominated for a Rhodes Scholarship, remembered by the chairman of her
department at Wellesley as “probably one of the top four or five students of the decade.” She was reported
to be a vegetarian, and “fun-loving,” although only “when time permitted,” and also to have had (these
were the Times‘s details) “concerns about the ethics of the American business world.”
In other words she was wrenched, even as she hung between death and life and later between
insentience and sentience, into New York’s ideal sister, daughter, Bachrach bride: a young woman of
conventional middle-class privilege and promise whose situation was such that many people tended to
overlook the fact that the state’s case against the accused was not invulnerable. The state could implicate
most of the defendants in the assault and rape in their own videotaped words, but had none of the
incontrovertible forensic evidence—no matching semen, no matching fingernail scrapings, no matching
blood—commonly produced in this kind of case. Despite the fact that jurors in the second trial would
eventually mention physical evidence as having been crucial in their bringing guilty verdicts against one
defendant, Kevin Richardson, there was not actually much physical evidence at hand. Fragments of hair
“similar [to] and consistent” with that of the victim were found on Kevin Richardson’s clothing and
underwear, but the state’s own criminologist had testified that hair samples were necessarily inconclusive
since, unlike fingerprints, they could not be traced to a single person. Dirt samples found on the defendants’
clothing were, again, similar to dirt found in the part of the park where the attack took place, but the state’s
criminologist allowed that the samples were also similar to dirt found in other uncultivated areas of the
park. To suggest, however, that this minimal physical evidence could open the case to an aggressive
defense—to, say, the kind of defense that such celebrated New York criminal lawyers as Jack Litman and
Barry Slotnick typically present—would come to be construed, during the weeks and months to come, as a
further attack on the victim.
She would be Lady Courage to The New York Post, she would be A Profile in Courage to The
Daily News and New York Newsday. She would become for Anna Quindlen in The New York Times the
figure of “New York rising above the dirt, the New Yorker who has known the best, and the worst, and has
stayed on, living somewhere in the middle.” She would become for David Dinkins, the first black mayor of
New York, the emblem of his apparently fragile hopes for the city itself: “I hope the city will be able to
learn a lesson from this event and be inspired by the young woman who was assaulted in the case,” he said.
“Despite tremendous odds, she is rebuilding her life. What a human life can do, a human society can do as
well.” She was even then for John Gutfreund, the chairman and chief executive officer of Salomon
Brothers, the personification of “what makes this city so vibrant and so great,” now “struck down by a side
of our city that is as awful and terrifying as the creative side is wonderful.” It was precisely in this
conflation of victim and city, this confusion of personal woe with public distress, that the crime’s “story”
would be found, its lesson, its encouraging promise of narrative resolution.
One reason the victim in this case could be so readily abstracted, and her situation so readily made
to stand for that of the city itself, was that she remained, as a victim of rape, unnamed in most press reports.
Although the American and English press convention of not naming victims of rape (adult rape victims are
named in French papers) derives from the understandable wish to protect the victim, the rationalization of
this-special protection rests on a number of doubtful, even magical, assumptions. The convention assumes,
by providing a protection for victims of rape not afforded victims of other assaults, that rape involves a
violation absent from other kinds of assault. The convention assumes that this violation is of a nature best
kept secret, that the rape victim feels, and would feel still more strongly were she identified, a shame and
self-loathing unique to this form of assault; in other words that she has been in an unspecified way party to
her own assault, that a special contract exists between this one kind of victim and her assailant.
The convention assumes, finally, that the victim would be, were this special contract revealed, the
natural object of prurient interest; that the act of male penetration involves such potent mysteries that the
woman so penetrated (as opposed, say, to having her face crushed with a brick or her brain penetrated with
a length of pipe) is permanently marked, “different,” even—especially if there is a perceived racial or
social “difference” between victim and assailant, as in nineteenth-century stories featuring white women
taken by Indians—”ruined.”
These quite specifically masculine assumptions (women do not want to be raped, nor do they want
to have their brains smashed, but very few mystify the difference between the two) tend in general to be
self-fulfilling, guiding the victim to define her assault as her protectors do. “Ultimately we’re doing women
a disservice by separating rape from other violent crimes,” Deni Elliott, the director of Dartmouth’s Ethics
Institute, suggested in a discussion of this custom in Time. “We are participating in the stigma of rape by
treating victims of this crime differently,” Geneva Overholser, the editor of the Des Moines Register, said
about her decision to publish in February 1990 a five-part piece about a rape victim who agreed to be
named. “When we as a society refuse to talk openly about rape, I think we weaken our ability to deal with
it.” Susan Estrich, a professor of criminal law at Harvard Law School and the manager of Michael
Dukakis’s 1988 presidential campaign, discussed, in Real Rape, the conflicting emotions that followed her
own 1974 rape:
At first, being raped is something you simply don’t talk about. Then it occurs to you that people
whose houses are broken into or who are mugged in Central Park talk about it all the time…. If it isn’t my
fault, why am I supposed to be ashamed? If I’m not ashamed, if it wasn’t “personal,” why look askance
when I mention it?
There were, in the 1989 Central Park attack, specific circumstances that reinforced the conviction
that the victim should not be named. She had clearly been, according to the doctors who examined her at
Metropolitan Hospital and to the statements made by the suspects (she herself remembered neither the
attack nor anything that happened during the next six weeks), raped by one or more assailants. She had also
been beaten so brutally that, fifteen months later, she could not focus her eyes or walk unaided. She had
lost all sense of smell. She could not read without experiencing double vision. She was believed at the time
to have permanently lost function in some areas of her brain.
Given these circumstances, the fact that neither the victim’s family nor, later, the victim herself
wanted her name known struck an immediate chord of sympathy, seemed a belated way to protect her as
she had not been protected in Central Park. Yet there was in this case a special emotional undertow that
derived in part from the deep and allusive associations and taboos attaching, in American black history, to
the idea of the rape of white women. Rape remained, in the collective memory of many blacks, the very
core of their victimization. Black men were accused of raping white women, even as black women were,
Malcolm X wrote in The Autobiography of Malcolm X, “raped by the slavemaster white man until there had
begun to emerge a home-made, handmade, brainwashed race that was no longer even of its true color, that
no longer even knew its true family names.” The very frequency of sexual contact between white men and
black women increased the potency of the taboo on any such contact between black men and white women.
The abolition of slavery, W.J. Cash wrote in The Mind of the South, in destroying the rigid fixity of the
black at the bottom of the scale, in throwing open to him at least the legal opportunity to advance, had
inevitably opened up to the mind of every Southerner a vista at the end of which stood the overthrow of this
taboo. If it was given to the black to advance at all, who could say (once more the logic of the doctrine of
his inherent inferiority would not hold) that he would not one day advance the whole way and lay claim to
complete equality, including, specifically, the ever crucial right of marriage?
What Southerners felt, therefore, was that any assertion of any kind on the part of the Negro
constituted in a perfectly real manner an attack on the Southern woman. What they saw, more or less
consciously, in the conditions of Reconstruction was a passage toward a condition for her as degrading, in
their view, as rape itself. And a condition, moreover, which, logic or no logic, they infallibly thought of as
being as absolutely forced upon her as rape, and hence a condition for which the term “rape” stood as truly
as for the de facto deed.
Nor was the idea of rape the only potentially treacherous undercurrent in this case. There has
historically been, for American blacks, an entire complex of loaded references around the question of
“naming”: slave names, masters’ names, African names, call me by my rightful name, nobody knows my
name; stories, in which the specific gravity of naming locked directly into that of rape, of black men
whipped for addressing white women by their given names.
That, in this case, just such an interlocking of references could work to fuel resentments and
inchoate hatreds seemed clear, and it seemed equally clear that some of what ultimately occurred—the
repeated references to lynchings, the identification of the defendants with the Scottsboro boys, the
insistently provocative repetition of the victim’s name, the weird and self-defeating insistence that no rape
had taken place and little harm been done the victim—derived momentum from this historical freight.
“Years ago, if a white woman said a Black man looked at her lustfully, he could be hung higher than a
magnolia tree in bloom, while a white mob watched joyfully sipping tea and eating cookies,” Yusef
Salaam’s mother reminded readers of The Amsterdam News. “The first thing you do in the United States of
America when a white woman is raped is round up a bunch of black youths, and I think that’s what
happened here,” the Reverend Calvin O. Butts III of the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem told The
New York Times. “You going to arrest me now ‘cause I said the jogger’s name?” Gary Byrd asked
rhetorically on his WLIB show.
I mean, she’s obviously a public figure, and a very mysterious one, I might add. Well, it’s a funny
place we live in called America, and should we be surprised that they’re up to their usual tricks? It was a
trick that got us here in the first place.
This reflected one of the problems with not naming this victim: she was in fact named all the time.
Everyone in the courthouse, everyone who worked for a paper or a television station or who followed the
case for whatever professional reason, knew her name. She was referred to by name in all court records and
in all court proceedings. She was named, in the days immediately following the attack, on local television
stations. She was also routinely named—and this was part of the difficulty, part of what led to a damaging
self-righteousness among those who did not name her and to an equally damaging embattlement among
those who did, in Manhattan’s black-owned newspapers, The Amsterdam News and The City Sun, and she
was named as well on WLIB, the Manhattan radio station owned by a black partnership which included
Percy Sutton and, until 1985 when he transferred his stock to his son, Mayor Dinkins.
That the victim in this case was identified on Centre Street and north of 96th Street but not in
between made for a certain cognitive dissonance, especially since the names of even the juvenile suspects
had been released by the police and the press before any suspect had even been arraigned, let alone
indicted. “The police normally withhold the names of minors who are accused of crimes,” the Times
explained (actually the police normally withhold the names of accused “juveniles,” or minors under age
sixteen, but not of minors sixteen or seventeen), “but officials said they made public the names of the
youths charged in the attack on the woman because of the seriousness of the incident.” There seemed a
debatable point here, the question of whether “the seriousness of the incident” might not have in fact
seemed a compelling reason to avoid any appearance of a rush to judgment by preserving the anonymity of
a juvenile suspect; one of the names released by the police and published in the Times was of a fourteenyear-old who was ultimately not indicted.
There were, early on, certain aspects of this case that seemed not wellhandled by the police and
prosecutors, and others that seemed not well-handled by the press. It would seem to have been tactically
unwise, since New York state law requires that a parent or guardian be present when children under sixteen
are questioned, for police to continue the interrogation of Yusef Salaam, then fifteen, on the grounds that
his Transit Authority bus pass said he was sixteen, while his mother was kept waiting outside. It would
seem to have been unwise for Linda Fairstein, the assistant district attorney in charge of Manhattan sex
crimes, to ignore, at the precinct house, the mother’s assertion that the son was fifteen, and later to suggest,
in open court, that the boy’s age had been unclear to her because the mother had used the word “minor.”
It would also seem to have been unwise for Linda Fairstein to tell David Nocenti, the assistant US attorney
who was paired with Yusef Salaam in a “Big Brother” program and who had come to the precinct house at
the mother’s request, that he had “no legal standing” there and that she would file a complaint with his
supervisors. It would seem in this volatile a case imprudent of the police to follow their normal procedure
by presenting Raymond Santana’s initial statement in their own words, cop phrases that would predictably
seem to some in the courtroom, as the expression of a fourteen-year-old held overnight and into the next
afternoon for interrogation, unconvincing:
On April 19, 1989, at approximately 20:30 hours, I was at the Taft Projects in the vicinity of 113th
St. and Madison Avenue. I was there with numerous friends…. At approximately 21:00 hours, we all
(myself and approximately 15 others) walked south on Madison Avenue to E. 110th Street, then walked
westbound to Fifth Avenue. At Fifth Avenue and 110th Street, we met up with an additional group of
approximately 15 other males, who also entered Central Park with us at that location with the intent to rob
cyclists and joggers….
In a case in which most of the defendants had made videotaped statements admitting at least some
role in the assault and rape, this less than meticulous attitude toward the gathering and dissemination of
information seemed peculiar and self-defeating, the kind of pressured or unthinking standard procedure that
could not only exacerbate the fears and angers and suspicions of conspiracy shared by many blacks but
conceivably open what seemed, on the basis of the confessions, a conclusive case to the kind of doubt that
would eventually keep juries out, in the trial of the first three defendants, ten days, and, in the trial of the
next two defendants, twelve days. One of the reasons the jury in the first trial could not agree, Manhattan
Lawyer reported in its October 1990 issue, was that one juror, Ronald Gold, remained “deeply troubled by
the discrepancies between the story [Antron] McCray tells on his videotaped statement and the prosecution
scenario”:
Why did McCray place the rape at the reservoir, Gold demanded, when all evidence indicated it
happened at the 102 Street crossdrive? Why did McCray say the jogger was raped where she fell, when the
prosecution said she’d been dragged 300 feet into the woods first? Why did McCray talk about having to
hold her arms down, if she was found bound and gagged? The debate raged for the last two days, with
jurors dropping in and out of Gold’s acquittal [for McCray] camp….
After the jurors watched McCray’s video for the fifth time, Miranda [Rafael Miranda, another
juror] knew it well enough to cite the time-code numbers imprinted at the bottom of the videotape as he
rebuffed Gold’s arguments with specific statements from McCray’s own lips. [McCray, on the videotape,
after admitting that he had held the victim by her left arm as her clothes were pulled off, volunteered that he
had “got on top” of her, and said that he had rubbed against her without an erection “so everybody
would…just know I did it.”] The pressure on Gold was mounting. Three jurors agree that it was evident
Gold, worn down perhaps by his own displays of temper as much as anything else, capitulated out of
exhaustion. While a bitter Gold told other jurors he felt terrible about ultimately giving in, Brueland
[Harold Brueland, another juror who had for a time favored acquittal for McCray] believes it was all part of
the process.
“I’d like to tell Ronnie some day that nervous exhaustion is an element built into the court system.
They know that,” Brueland says of court officials. “They know we’re only going to be able to take it for so
long. It’s just a matter of, you know, who’s got the guts to stick with it.”
So fixed were the emotions provoked by this case that the idea that there could have been, for even
one juror, even a moment’s doubt in the state’s case, let alone the kind of doubt that could be sustained
over ten days or twelve, seemed, to many in the city, bewildering, almost unthinkable: the attack on the
jogger had by then passed into narrative, and the narrative was about confrontation, about what Governor
Cuomo had called “the ultimate shriek of alarm,” about what was wrong with the city and about its
solution. What was wrong with the city had been identified, and its names were Raymond Santana, Yusef
Salaam, Antron McCray, Kharey Wise, Kevin Richardson, and Steve Lopez. “They never could have
thought of it as they raged through Central Park, tormenting and ruining people,” Bob Herbert wrote in the
News after the verdicts came in on the first three defendants.
There was no way it could have crossed their vicious minds. Running with the pack, they would
have scoffed at the very idea. They would have laughed.
And yet it happened. In the end, Yusef Salaam, Antron McCray and Raymond Santana were nailed by a
woman.
Elizabeth Lederer stood in the courtroom and watched Saturday night as the three were hauled off
to jail…. At times during the trial, she looked about half the height of the long and lanky Salaam, who
sneered at her from the witness stand.
Salaam was apparently too dumb to realize that Lederer—this petite, soft-spoken, curly-haired
prosecutor—was the jogger’s avenger….
You could tell that her thoughts were elsewhere, that she was thinking about the jogger.
You could tell that she was thinking: I did it.
I did it for you.
Do this in remembrance of me: the solution, then, or so such pervasive fantasies suggested, was to
partake of the symbolic body and blood of The Jogger, whose idealization was by this point complete, and
was rendered, significantly, in details stressing her “difference,” or superior class. The Jogger was someone
who wore, according to Newsday, “a light gold chain around her slender neck” as well as, according to the
News, a “modest” gold ring and “a thin sheen” of lipstick. The Jogger was someone who would not,
according to the Post, “even dignify her alleged attackers with a glance.” The Jogger was someone who
spoke, according to the News, in accents “suited to boardrooms,” accents that might therefore seem
“foreign to many native New Yorkers.” In her first appearance on the witness stand she had been subjected,
the Times noted, “to questions that most people do not have to answer publicly during their lifetimes,”
principally about her use of a diaphragm on the Sunday preceding the attack, and had answered these
questions, according to an editorial in the News, with an “indomitable dignity” that had taught the city a
lesson “about courage and class.”
This emphasis on perceived refinements of character and of manner and of taste tended to distort
and to flatten, and ultimately to suggest not the actual victim of an actual crime but a fictional character of a
slightly earlier period, the well-brought-up maiden who briefly graces the city with her presence and
receives in turn a taste of “real life.” The defendants, by contrast, were seen as incapable of appreciating
these marginal distinctions, ignorant of both the norms and accoutrements of middle-class life. “Did you
have jogging clothes on?” Elizabeth Lederer asked Yusef Salaam, by way of trying to discredit his
statement that he had gone into the park that night only to “walk around.” Did he have “jogging clothes,”
did he have “sports equipment,” did he have “a bicycle.” A pernicious nostalgia had come to permeate the
case, a longing for the New York that had seemed for a while to be about “sports equipment,” about getting
and spending rather than about having and not having: the reason that this victim must not be named was so
that she could go unrecognized, it was astonishingly said, by Jerry Nachman, the editor of the New York
Post, and then by others who seemed to find in this a particular resonance, to Bloomingdale’s.
Some New York stories involving young middle-class white women do not make it to the editorial
pages, or even necessarily to the front pages. In April 1990, a young middle-class white woman named
Laurie Sue Rosenthal, raised in an Orthodox Jewish household and at age twenty-nine still living with her
parents in Jamaica, Queens, happened to die, according to the coroner’s report from the accidental toxicity
of Darvocet in combination with alcohol, in an apartment at 36 East 68th Street in Manhattan. The
apartment belonged to the man she had been, according to her parents, seeing for about a year, a minor
assistant city commissioner named Peter Franconeri. Peter Franconeri, who was at the time in charge of
elevator and boiler inspections for the Buildings Department and married to someone else, wrapped Laurie
Sue Rosenthal’s body in a blanket; placed it, along with her handbag and ID, outside the building with the
trash; and went to his office at 60 Hudson Street. At some point an anonymous call was made to 911.
Franconeri was identified only after her parents gave the police his beeper number, which they found in her
address book. According to Newsday, which covered the story more extensively than the News, the Post, or
the Times,
Initial police reports indicated that there were no visible wounds on Rosenthal’s body. But
Rosenthal’s mother, Ceil, said yesterday that the family was told the autopsy revealed two “unexplained
bruises” on her daughter’s body.
Larry and Ceil Rosenthal said those findings seemed to support their suspicions that their daughter
was upset because they received a call from their daughter at 3 AM Thursday “saying that he had beaten
her up.” The family reported the conversation to police.
“I told her to get into a cab and get home,” Larry Rosenthal said yesterday. “The next I heard was
two detectives telling me terrible things.”
“The ME [medical examiner] said the bruises did not constitute a beating but they were going to
examine them further,” Ceil Rosenthal said.
“There were some minor bruises,” a spokeswoman for the office of the chief medical examiner
told Newsday a few days later, but the bruises “did not in any way contribute to her death.” This is worth
rerunning: a young woman calls her parents at three in the morning, “distraught.” She says that she has
been beaten up. A few hours later, on East 68th Street between Madison and Park Avenues, a few steps
from Porthault and Pratesi and Armani and Saint Laurent and the Westbury Hotel, at a time of day in this
part of New York 10021 when Jim Buck’s dog trainers are assembling their morning packs and Henry
Kravis’s Bentley is idling outside his Park Avenue apartment and the construction crews are clocking in
over near the Frick at the multi-million-dollar houses under reconstruction for Bill Cosby and for the owner
of The Limited, this young middle-class white woman’s body, showing bruises, gets put out with the trash.
“Everybody got upside down because of who he was,” an unidentified police officer later told Jim Dwyer
of Newsday, referring to the man who put the young woman out with the trash. “If it had happened to
anyone else, nothing would have come of it. A summons would have been issued and that would have been
the end of it.” In fact nothing did come of the death of Laurie Sue Rosenthal, which might have seemed a
natural tabloid story but failed, on several levels, to catch the local imagination. For one thing she could not
be trimmed into the role of the preferred tabloid victim, who is conventionally presented as fate’s random
choice (Laurie Sue Rosenthal had, for whatever reason, taken the Darvocet instead of a taxi home, her
parents reported treatment for a previous Valium dependency, she could be presumed to have known over
the course of a year that Franconeri was married and yet continued to see him); for another, she seemed not
to have attended an expensive school or to have been employed in a glamour industry (no Ivy Grad, no
Wall Street Exec), which made it hard to cast her as part of “what makes this city so vibrant and so great.”
In August 1990, Peter Franconeri pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor, the unlawful removal of a
body, and was sentenced by Criminal Court Judge Peter Benitez to seventy-five hours of community
service. This was neither surprising nor much of a story (only twenty-three lines even in Newsday, on page
twenty-nine of the city edition), and the case’s resolution was for many people a kind of relief. The district
attorney’s office had asked for “some incarceration,” the amount usually described as a touch, but no one
wanted, it was said, to crucify the guy: Peter Franconeri was somebody who knew a lot of people,
understood how to live in the city, who had for example not only the apartment on East 68th Street between
Madison and Park but a house in Southampton and who also understood that putting a body outside with
the trash was nothing to get upside down about, if it was handled right. Such understandings may in fact
have been the city’s true “ultimate shriek of alarm,” but it was not a shriek the city wanted to recognize.
2.
Perhaps the most arresting collateral news to surface, during the first few days after the attack on
the Central Park jogger, was that a significant number of New Yorkers apparently believed the city
sufficiently well-ordered to incorporate Central Park into their evening fitness schedules. “Prudence” was
defined, even after the attack, as “staying south of 90th Street,” or having “an awareness that you need to
think about planning your routes,” or, in the case of one woman interviewed by the Times, deciding to quit
her daytime job (she was a lawyer) because she was “tired of being stuck out there, running later and later
at night.” “I don’t think there’s a runner who couldn’t describe the silky, gliding feeling you get running at
night,” an editor of Runner’s World told the Times. “You see less of what’s around you and you become
centered on your running.”
The notion that Central Park at night might be a good place to “see less of what’s around you” was
recent. There were two reasons why Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, when they devised their
winning entry in the 1858 competition for a Central Park design, decided to sink the transverse roads below
grade level. One reason, the most often cited, was aesthetic, a recognition on the part of the designers that
the four crossings specified by the terms of the competition, at 65th, 79th, 85th, and 97th Streets, would
intersect the sweep of the landscape, be “at variance with those agreeable sentiments which we should wish
the park to inspire.” The other reason, which appears to have been equally compelling, had to do with
security. The problem with grade-level crossings, Olmsted and Vaux wrote in their “Greensward” plan,
would be this:
The transverse roads will…have to be kept open, while the park proper will be useless for any
good purpose after dusk; for experience has shown that even in London, with its admirable police
arrangements, the public cannot be assured safe transit through large open spaces of ground after nightfall.
These public thoroughfares will then require to be well lighted at the sides, and, to restrain marauders
pursued by the police from escaping into the obscurity of the park, strong fences or walls, six or eight feet
high, will be necessary.
The park, in other words, was seen from its conception as intrinsically dangerous after dark, a
place of “obscurity,” “useless for any good purpose,” a refuge only for “marauders.” The parks of Europe
closed at nightfall, Olmsted noted in his 1882 pamphlet The Spoils of the Park: With a Few Leaves from the
Deep-laden Note-books of “A Wholly Unpractical Man,” “but one surface road is kept open across Hyde
Park, and the superintendent of the Metropolitan Police told me that a man’s chances of being garrotted or
robbed were, because of the facilities for concealment to be found in the Park, greater in passing at night
along this road than anywhere else in London.”
In the high pitch of the initial “jogger” coverage, suggesting as it did a city overtaken by animals,
this pragmatic approach to urban living gave way to a more ideal construct, one in which New York either
had once been or should be “safe,” and now, as in Governor Cuomo’s “none of us is safe,” was not. It was
time, accordingly, to “take it back,” time to “say no”; time, as David Dinkins would put it during his
campaign for the mayoralty in the summer of 1989, to “draw the line.” What the line was to be drawn
against was “crime,” an abstract, a free-floating specter that could be dispelled by certain acts of personal
affirmation, by the kind of moral rearmament which later figured in Mayor Dinkins’s plan to revitalize the
city by initiating weekly “Tuesday Night Out Against Crime” rallies.
By going into the park at night, Tom Wicker wrote in the Times, the victim in this case had
“affirmed the primacy of freedom over fear.” A week after the assault, Susan Chace suggested on the op-ed
page of the Times that readers walk into the park at night and join hands. “A woman can’t run in the park at
an offbeat time,” she wrote. “Accept it, you say. I can’t. It shouldn’t be like this in New York City, in 1989,
in spring.” Ronnie Eldridge also suggested that readers walk into the park at night, but to light candles.
“Who are we that we allow ourselves to be chased out of the most magnificent part of our city?” she asked,
and also: “If we give up the park, what are we supposed to do: Fall back to Columbus Avenue and plant
grass?” This was interesting, suggesting as it did that the city’s not inconsiderable problems could be
solved by the willingness of its citizens to hold or draw some line, to “say no”; in other words that a
reliance on certain magical gestures could affect the city’s fate.
The insistent sentimentalization of experience, which is to say the encouragement of such reliance,
is not new in New York. A preference for broad strokes, for the distortion and flattening of character, and
for the reduction of events to narrative, has been for well over a hundred years the heart of the way the city
presents itself: Lady Liberty, huddled masses, ticker-tape parades, heroes, gutters, bright lights, broken
hearts, eight million stories in the naked city; eight million stories and all the same story, each devised to
obscure not only the city’s actual tensions of race and class but also, more significantly, the civic and
commercial arrangements that rendered those tensions irreconcilable.
Central Park itself was such a “story,” an artificial pastoral in the nineteenth-century English
romantic tradition, conceived, during a decade when the population of Manhattan would increase by 58
percent, as a civic project that would allow the letting of contracts and the employment of voters on a scale
rarely before undertaken in New York. Ten million cartloads of dirt would need to be shifted during the
twenty years of its construction. Four to five million trees and plants would need to be planted, half a
million cubic yards of topsoil imported, 114 miles of ceramic pipe laid.
Nor need the completion of the park mean the end of the possibilities: in 1870, once William
Marcy Tweed had revised the city charter and invented his Department of Public Parks, new roads could be
built whenever jobs were needed. Trees could be dug up, and replanted. Crews could be set loose to prune,
to clear, to hack at will. Frederick Law Olmsted, when he objected, could be overridden, and finally eased
out. “A ‘delegation’ from a great political organization called on me by appointment,” Olmsted wrote in
The Spoils of the Park, recalling the conditions under which he had worked:
After introductions and handshakings, a circle was formed, and a gentleman stepped before me,
and said, “We know how much pressed you must be…but at your convenience our association would like
to have you determine what share of your patronage we can expect, and make suitable arrangements for our
using it. We will take the liberty to suggest, sir, that there could be no more convenient way than that you
should send us our due quota of tickets, if you please, sir, in this form, leaving us to fill in the name.” Here
a pack of printed tickets was produced, from which I took one at random. It was a blank appointment and
bore the signature of Mr. Tweed….
As superintendent of the Park, I once received in six days more than seven thousand letters of
advice as to appointments, nearly all from men in office…. I have heard a candidate for a magisterial office
in the city addressing from my doorsteps a crowd of such advice-bearers, telling them that I was bound to
give them employment, and suggesting plainly, that, if I was slow about it, a rope round my neck might
serve to lessen my reluctance to take good counsel. I have had a dozen men force their way into my house
before I had risen from bed on a Sunday morning, and some break into my drawing-room in their eagerness
to deliver letters of advice.
Central Park, then, for its underwriters if not for Olmsted, was about contracts and concrete and
kickbacks, about pork, but the sentimentalization that worked to obscure the pork, the “story,” had to do
with certain dramatic contrasts, or extremes, that were believed to characterize life in this as in no other
city. These “contrasts,” which have since become the very spine of the New York narrative, appeared early
on: Philip Hone, the mayor of New York in 1826 and 1827, spoke in 1843 of a city “overwhelmed with
population, and where the two extremes of costly luxury in living, expensive establishments and
improvident wastes are presented in daily and hourly contrast with squalid mixing and hapless destruction.”
Given this narrative, Central Park could be and ultimately would be seen the way Olmsted himself saw it,
as an essay in democracy, a social experiment meant to socialize a new immigrant population and to
ameliorate the perilous separation of rich and poor. It was the duty and the interest of the city’s privileged
class, Olmsted had suggested some years before he designed Central Park, to “get up parks, gardens, music,
dancing schools, reunions which will be so attractive as to force into contact the good and the bad, the
gentleman and the rowdy.”
The notion that the interests of the “gentleman” and the “rowdy” might be at odds did not intrude:
then as now, the preferred narrative worked to veil actual conflict, to cloud the extent to which the
condition of being rich was predicated upon the continued neediness of a working class; to confirm the
responsible stewardship of “the gentleman” and to forestall the possibility of a self-conscious, or
politicized, proletariat. Social and economic phenomena, in this narrative, were personalized. Politics were
exclusively electoral. Problems were best addressed by the emergence and election of “leaders,” who could
in turn inspire the individual citizen to “participate,” or “make a difference.” “Will you help?” Mayor
Dinkins asked New Yorkers, in a September address from St. Patrick’s Cathedral intended as a response to
the “New York crime wave” stories then leading the news. “Do you care? Are you ready to become part of
the solution?”
“Stay,” Governor Cuomo urged the same New Yorkers. “Believe. Participate. Don’t give up.”
Manhattan Borough President Ruth Messinger, at the dedication of a school flagpole, mentioned the
importance of “getting involved” and “participating,” or “pitching in to put the shine back on The Big
Apple.” In a discussion of the popular “New York” stories written between 1902 and 1910 by William
Sidney Porter, or “O. Henry,” William R. Taylor of the State University of New York at Stony Brook
spoke of the way in which these stories, with their “focus on individuals’ plights,” their “absence of social
or political implications” and “ideological neutrality,” provided “a miraculous form of social glue”:
These sentimental accounts of relations between classes in the city have a specific historical
meaning: empathy without political compassion. They reduce the scale of human suffering to what
atomized individuals endure as their plucky, sad lives were recounted week after week for almost a
decade…. Their sentimental reading of oppression, class differences, human suffering, and affection helped
create a new language for interpreting the city’s complex society, a language that began to replace the
threadbare moralism that New Yorkers inherited from nineteenth-century readings of the city. This
language localized suffering in particular moments and confined it to particular occasions; it smoothed over
differences because it could be read almost the same way from either end of the social scale. *
Stories in which terrible crimes are inflicted on innocent victims, offering as they do a similarly
sentimental reading of class differences and human suffering, a reading that promises both resolution and
retribution, have long performed as the city’s endorphins, a built-in source of natural morphine working to
blur the edges of real and to a great extent insoluble problems. What is singular about New York, and
remains virtually incomprehensible to people who live in less rigidly organized parts of the country, is the
minimal level of comfort and opportunity its citizens have come to accept. The romantic capitalist pursuit
of privacy and security and individual freedom, so taken for granted nationally, plays, locally, not much
role. A city where virtually every impulse has been to stifle rather than to encourage normal competition,
New York works, when it does work, not on a market economy but on little deals, payoffs,
accommodations, baksheesh, arrangements that circumvent the direct exchange of goods and services and
prevent what would be, in a competitive economy, the normal ascendance of the superior product.
There were in the five boroughs in 1990 only 581 supermarkets (a supermarket, as defined by the
trade magazine Progressive Grocer, is a market that does an annual volume of two million dollars), or,
assuming a population of eight million, one supermarket for every 13,769 citizens. Groceries, costing more
than they should because of this absence of competition and also because of the proliferation of payoffs
required to ensure this absence of competition (produce, we have come to understand, belongs to the
Gambinos, and fish to the Lucheses and the Genoveses, and a piece of the construction of the market to
each of the above, but keeping the door open belongs finally to the inspector here, the inspector there), are
carried home or delivered, as if in Jakarta, by pushcart.
It has historically taken, in New York as if in Mexico City, ten years to process and specify and
bid and contract and construct a new school; twenty or thirty years to build or, in the cases of Bruckner
Boulevard and the West Side Highway, to not quite build a highway. A recent public scandal revealed that
a batch of city-ordered Pap smears had gone unread for more than a year (in the developed world the Pap
smear, a test for cervical cancer, is commonly read within a few days); what did not become a public
scandal, what is still accepted as the way things are, is that even Pap smears ordered by Park Avenue
gynecologists can go unread for several weeks.
Such resemblances to cities of the third world are in no way casual, or based on the “color” of a
polyglot population: these are all cities arranged primarily not to improve the lives of their citizens but to
be labor-intensive, to accommodate, ideally at the subsistence level, since it is at the subsistence level that
the work force is most apt to be captive and loyalty assured, a third-world population. In some ways New
York’s very attractiveness, its promises of opportunity and improved wages, its commitments as a city in
the developed world, were what seemed destined to render it ultimately unworkable. Where the vitality of
such cities in the less developed world had depended on their ability to guarantee low-cost labor and an
absence of regulation, New York had historically depended instead on the constant welling up of new
businesses, of new employers to replace those phased out, like the New York garment manufacturers who
found it cheaper to make their clothes in Hong Kong or Kuala Lumpur or Taipei, by rising local costs.
It had been the old pattern of New York, supported by an expanding national economy, to lose one
kind of business and gain another. It was the more recent error of New York to misconstrue this history of
turnover as an indestructible resource, there to be taxed at will, there to be regulated whenever a dollar
could be seen in doing so, there for the taking. By 1977, New York had lost some 600,000 jobs, most of
them in manufacturing and in the kinds of small businesses that could no longer maintain their narrow
profit margins inside the city. During the “recovery” years, from 1977 until 1988, most of these jobs were
indeed replaced, but in a potentially perilous way: of the 500,000 new jobs created, most were in the area
most vulnerable to a downturn, that of financial and business services, and many of the rest in an area not
only equally vulnerable to bad times but dispiriting to the city even in good, that of tourist and restaurant
services.
The demonstration that many kinds of businesses were finding New York expendable had failed to
prompt real efforts to make the city more competitive. Taxes grew still more punitive, regulation more
byzantine. Forty-nine thousand new jobs were created in New York’s city agencies between 1983 and
1990, even as the services provided by those agencies were widely perceived to decline. Attempts at
“reform” typically tended to create more jobs: in 1988, in response to the length of time it was taking to
build or repair a school, a new agency, the School Construction Authority, was formed. A New York City
school, it was said, would now take only five years to build. The head of the School Construction Authority
was to receive $145,000 a year and each of the three vice-presidents $110,000 a year. An executive gym,
with Nautilus equipment, was contemplated for the top floor of the agency’s new headquarters at the
International Design Center in Long Island City. Two years into this reform, the backlog on repairs to
existing schools stood at 33,000 outstanding requests. “To relieve the charity of friends of the support of a
half-blind and half-witted man by employing him at the public expense as an inspector of cement may not
be practical with reference to the permanent firmness of a wall,” Olmsted noted after his Central Park
experience, “while it is perfectly so with reference to the triumph of sound doctrine at an election.”
In fact the highest per capita taxes of any city in the United States (and, as anyone running a small
business knows, the widest variety of taxes) provide, in New York, unless the citizen is prepared to cut a
side deal here and there, only the continuing multiplication of regulations designed to benefit the
contractors and agencies and unions with whom the regulators have cut their own deals. A kitchen
appliance accepted throughout the rest of the United States as a basic postwar amenity, the in-sink garbage
disposal unit, is for example illegal in New York. Disposals, a city employee advised me, not only
encourage rats and “bacteria,” presumably in a way that bags of garbage sitting on the sidewalk do not
(“because it is,” I was told when I asked how this could be), but also encourage people “to put their babies
down them.”
On the one hand this illustrates how a familiar urban principle, that of patronage (the more
garbage there is to be collected, the more garbage collectors can be employed), can be reduced, in the
bureaucratic wilderness that is any third world city, to voodoo; on the other it reflects this particular city’s
underlying criminal ethic, its acceptance of graft and grift as the bedrock of every transaction. “Garbage
costs are outrageous,” an executive of Supermarkets General, which owns Pathmark, recently told City
Limits about why the chains preferred to locate in the suburbs. “Every time you need to hire a contractor,
it’s a problem.” The problem, however, is one from which not only the contractor but everyone with whom
the contractor does business—a chain of direct or indirect patronage extending deep into the fabric of the
city—stands to derive one or another benefit, which was one reason the death of the young middle-class
white woman in the East 68th Street apartment of the assistant commissioner in charge of boiler and
elevator inspections flickered so feebly on the local attention span.
It was only within the transforming narrative of “contrasts” that both the essential criminality of
the city and its related absence of civility could become points of pride, evidence of “energy”: if you could
make it here you could make it anywhere, hello sucker, get smart. Those who did not get the deal, who
bought retail, who did not know what it took to get their electrical work signed off, were dismissed as
provincials, bridge-and-tunnels, out-of-towners who did not have what it took not to get taken. “Every
tourist’s nightmare became a reality for a Maryland couple over the weekend when the husband was beaten
and robbed on Fifth Avenue in front of Trump Tower,” began a story in The New York Post this summer.
“Where do you think we’re from, Iowa?” the prosecutor who took Robert Chambers’s statement said on
videotape by way of indicating that he doubted Chambers’s version of Jennifer Levin’s death. “They go
after poor people like you from out of town, they prey on the tourists,” a clerk explained last spring in the
West 46th Street computer store where my husband and I had taken refuge to escape three muggers. My
husband said that we lived in New York. “That’s why they didn’t get you,” the clerk said, effortlessly
incorporating this change in the data. “That’s how you could move fast.”
The narrative comforts us, in other words, with the assurance that the world is knowable, even flat,
and New York its center, its motor, its dangerous but vital “energy.” “FAMILY IN FATAL MUGGING
LOVED NEW YORK” was the Times headline on a story following the September murder, in the Seventh
Avenue IND station, of a twenty-two-year-old tourist from Utah. The young man, his parents, his brother,
and his sister-in-law had attended the US Open and were reportedly on their way to dinner at a Moroccan
restaurant downtown. “New York, to them, was the greatest place in the world,” a family friend from Utah
was quoted as having said. Since the narrative requires that the rest of the country provide a dramatic
contrast to New York, the family’s hometown in Utah was characterized by the Times as a place where
“life revolves around the orderly rhythms of Brigham Young University” and “there is only about one
murder a year.” The town was in fact Provo, where Gary Gilmore shot the motel manager, both in life and
in The Executioner’s Song. “She loved New York, she just loved it,” a friend of the assaulted jogger told
the Times after the attack. “I think she liked the fast pace, the competitiveness.”
New York, the Times concluded, “invigorated” the jogger, “matched her energy level.” At a time
when the city lay virtually inert, when forty thousand jobs had been wiped out in the financial markets and
former traders were selling shirts at Bergdorf Goodman for Men, when the rate of mortgage delinquencies
had doubled, when fifty or sixty million square feet of office space remained unrented (sixty million square
feet of unrented office space is the equivalent of fifteen darkened World Trade Towers) and even prime
commercial blocks on Madison Avenue in the Seventies were boarded up, empty; at a time when the
money had dropped out of all the markets and the Europeans who had lent the city their élan and their
capital during the Eighties had moved on, vanished to more cheerful venues, this notion of the city’s
“energy” was sedative, as was the commandeering of “crime” as the city’s central problem.
3.
The extent to which the October 1987 crash of the New York financial markets damaged the
illusions of infinite recovery and growth on which the city had operated during the 1980s had been at first
hard to apprehend. “Ours is a time of New York ascendant,” the New York City Commission on the Year
2000, created during the mayoralty of Ed Koch to reflect the best thinking of the city’s various business and
institutional establishments, had declared in its 1987 report. “The city’s economy is stronger than it has
been in decades, and is driven both by its own resilience and by the national economy; New York is more
than ever the international capital of finance, and the gateway to the American economy….”
And then, its citizens had come gradually to understand, it was not. This perception that something was
“wrong” in New York had been insidious, a slow onset illness at first noticeable only in periods of
temporary remission. Losses that might have seemed someone else’s problem (or even comeuppance) as
the markets were in their initial 1987 free fall, and that might have seemed more remote still as the markets
regained the appearance of strength, had come imperceptibly but inexorably to alter the tone of daily life.
By April 1990, people who lived in and around New York were expressing, in interviews with the Times,
considerable anguish and fear that they did so: “I feel very resentful that I’ve lost a lot of flexibility in my
life,” one said. “I often wonder, ‘Am I crazy for coming here?’ ” “People feel a sense of impending doom
about what may happen to them,” a clinical psychologist said. People were “frustrated,” “feeling absolutely
desolate,” “trapped,” “angry,” “terrified,” and “on the verge of panic.”
It was a panic that seemed in many ways specific to New York, and inexplicable outside it. Even
now, when the troubles of New York are a common theme, Americans from less depressed venues have
difficulty comprehending the nature of those troubles, and tend to attribute them, as New Yorkers
themselves have come to do, to “crime.” ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK was the headline on the front page
of the New York Post on September 10, 1990. RAMPAGING CRIME WAVE HAS 59 PERCENT OF
RESIDENTS TERRIFIED. MOST WOULD GET OUT OF THE CITY, SAYS TIME/CNN POLL. This
poll appeared in the edition of Time dated September 17, 1990, which carried the cover legend THE
ROTTING OF THE BIG APPLE. “Reason: a surge of drugs and violent crime that government officials
seem utterly unable to combat,” the story inside explained. Columnists referred, locally, to “this sewer of a
city.” The Times ran a plaintive piece about the snatching of Elizabeth Rohatyn’s Hermes handbag outside
Arcadia, a restaurant on East 62nd Street that had for a while seemed the very heart of the New York
everyone now missed, the New York where getting and spending could take place without undue reference
to having and not having, the duty-free New York; that this had occurred to the wife of Felix Rohatyn, who
was widely perceived to have saved the city from its fiscal crisis in the mid-Seventies, seemed to many a
clarion irony.
This question of crime was tricky. There were in fact eight American cities with higher homicide
rates, and twelve with higher overall crime rates. Crime had long been taken for granted in the less affluent
parts of the city, and had become in the mid-Seventies, as both unemployment and the costs of maintaining
property rose and what had once been functioning neighborhoods were abandoned and burned and left to
whoever claimed them, endemic. “In some poor neighborhoods, crime became almost a way of life,” Jim
Sleeper, an editor at Newsday and the author of The Closest of Strangers: Liberalism and the Politics of
Race in New York, noted in his discussion of the social disintegration that occurred during this period:
…a subculture of violence with complex bonds of utility and affection within families and the larger, “lawabiding” community. Struggling merchants might “fence” stolen goods, for example, thus providing quick
cover and additional incentive for burglaries and robberies; the drug economy became more vigorous,
reshaping criminal life-styles and tormenting the loyalties of families and friends. A walk down even a
reasonably busy street in a poor, minority neighborhood at high noon could become an unnerving journey
into a landscape eerie and grim.
What seemed markedly different a decade later, what made crime a “story,” was that the more
privileged, and especially the more privileged white, citizens of New York had begun to feel unnerved at
high noon in even their own neighborhoods. Although New York City Police Department statistics
suggested that white New Yorkers were not actually in increased mortal danger (the increase in homicides
between 1977 and 1989, from 1,557 to 1,903, was entirely in what the NYPD classified as Hispanic, Asian,
and black victims; the number of white murder victims had steadily declined, from 361 in 1977 to 227 in
1984 and 190 in 1989), the apprehension of such danger, exacerbated by street snatches and muggings and
the quite useful sense that the youth in the hooded sweatshirt with his hands jammed in his pockets might
well be a predator, had become general. These more privileged New Yorkers now felt unnerved not only on
the street, where the necessity for evasive strategies had become an exhausting constant, but even in the
most insulated and protected apartment buildings. As the residents of such buildings, the owners of twelveand sixteen- and twenty-four-room apartments, watched the potted ficus trees disappear from outside their
doors and the graffiti appear on their limestone walls and the smashed safety glass from car windows get
swept off their sidewalks, it had become increasingly easy to imagine the outcome of a confrontation
between, say, the relief night doorman and six dropouts from Julia Richman High School on East 67th
Street.
And yet those New Yorkers who had spoken to the Times in April of 1990 about their loss of
flexibility, about their panic, their desolation, their anger, and their sense of impending doom, had not been
talking about drugs, or crime, or any of the city’s more publicized and to some extent inflated ills. These
were people who did not for the most part have twelve- and sixteen-room apartments and doormen and the
luxury of projected fears. These people were talking instead about an immediate fear, about money, about
the vertiginous plunge in the value of their houses and apartments and condominiums, about the possibility
or probability of foreclosure and loss; about, implicitly, their fear of being left, like so many they saw every
day, below the line, out in the cold, on the street.
This was a climate in which many of the questions that had seized the city’s attention in 1987 and
1988, for example that of whether Mortimer Zuckerman should be “allowed” to build two fifty-nine-story
office towers on the site of what is now the Coliseum, seemed in retrospect wistful, the baroque concerns of
better times. “There’s no way anyone would make a sane judgment to go into the ground now,” a vicepresident at Cushman and Wakefield told The New York Observer about the delay in the Coliseum project,
which had in fact lost its projected major tenant, Salomon Brothers, shortly after Black Monday, 1987. “It
would be suicide. You’re better off sitting in a tub of water and opening your wrists.” Such fears were, for a
number of reasons, less easy to incorporate into the narrative than the fear of crime.
The imposition of a sentimental, or false, narrative on the disparate and often random experience
that constitutes the life of a city or a country means, necessarily, that much of what happens in that city or
country will be rendered merely illustrative, a series of set pieces, or performance opportunities. Mayor
Dinkins could, in such a symbolic substitute for civic life, “break the boycott” (the Flatbush boycott
organized to mobilize resentment of Korean merchants in black neighborhoods) by purchasing a few
dollars worth of produce from a Korean grocer on Church Avenue. Governor Cuomo could “declare war on
crime” by calling for five thousand additional police; Mayor Dinkins could “up the ante” by calling for
sixty-five hundred. “White slut comes into the park looking for the African man,” a black woman could
say, her voice loud but still conversational, in the corridor outside the courtroom where, during the summer
of 1990, the first three defendants in the Central Park attack, Antron McCray, Yusef Salaam, and Raymond
Santana, were tried on charges of attempted murder, assault, sodomy, and rape. “Boyfriend beats shit out of
her, they blame it on our boys,” the woman could continue, and then, referring to a young man with whom
the victim had at one time split the cost of an apartment: “How about the roommate, anybody test his
semen? No. He’s white. They don’t do it to each other.”
Glances could then flicker among those reporters and producers and courtroom sketch artists and
photographers and cameramen and techs and summer interns who assembled daily at 111 Centre Street.
Cellular phones could be picked up, a show of indifference. Small talk could be exchanged with the
marshals, a show of solidarity. The woman could then raise her voice: “White folk, all of them are devils,
even those that haven’t been born yet, they are devils. Little demons. I don’t understand these devils, I
guess they think this is their court.” The reporters could gaze beyond her, faces blank, no eye contact, a
more correct form of hostility and also more lethal. The woman could hold her ground but avert her eyes,
letting her gaze fall on another black, in this instance a black Daily News columnist, Bob Herbert. “You,”
she could say. “You are a disgrace. Go ahead. Line up there. Line up with the white folk. Look at them,
lining up for their first-class seats while my people are downstairs behind barricades…kept behind
barricades like cattle…not even allowed in the room to see their sons lynched…is that an African I see in
that line? Or is that a negro. Oh, oh, sorry, shush, white folk didn’t know, he was passing….”
In a city in which grave and disrupting problems had become general—problems of not having,
problems of not making it, problems that demonstrably existed, among the mad and the ill and the underequipped and the overwhelmed, with decreasing reference to color—the case of the Central Park jogger
provided more than just a safe, or structured, setting in which various and sometimes only marginally
related rages could be vented. “This trial,” the Daily News announced on its editorial page one morning in
July 1990, midway through the trial of the first three defendants, “is about more than the rape and
brutalization of a single woman. It is about the rape and the brutalization of a city. The jogger is a symbol
of all that’s wrong here. And all that’s right, because she is nothing less than an inspiration.”
The News did not define the ways in which “the rape and brutalization of the city” manifested
itself, nor was definition necessary: this was a city in which the threat or the fear of brutalization had
become so immediate that citizens were urged to take up their own defense, to form citizen patrols or
militia, as in Beirut. This was a city in which between twenty and thirty neighborhoods had already given
over their protection, which was to say the right to determine who belonged in the neighborhood and who
did not and what should be done about it, to the Guardian Angels. This was a city in which a Brooklyn
vigilante group, which called itself “Crack Busters” and was said to be trying to rid its Bedford-Stuyvesant
neighborhood of drugs, would before September was out “settle an argument” by dousing with gasoline
and setting on fire an abandoned van and the three homeless citizens inside. This was a city in which the
Times would soon perceive, in the failing economy, “a bright side for the city at large,” the bright side
being that while there was believed to have been an increase in the number of middle-income and upper-
income families who wanted to leave the city, “the slumping market is keeping many of those families in
New York.”
In this city rapidly vanishing into the chasm between its actual life and its preferred narratives,
what people said when they talked about the case of the Central Park jogger came to seem a kind of poetry,
a way of expressing, without directly stating, different but equally volatile and similarly occult visions of
the same disaster. One vision, shared by those who had seized upon the attack on the jogger as an exact
representation of what was wrong with the city, was of a city systematically ruined, violated, raped by its
underclass. The opposing vision, shared by those who had seized upon the arrest of the defendants as an
exact representation of their own victimization, was of a city in which the powerless had been
systematically ruined, violated, raped by the powerful. For so long as this case held the city’s febrile
attention, then, it offered a narrative for the city’s distress, a frame in which the actual social and economic
forces wrenching the city could be personalized and ultimately obscured.
Or rather it offered two narratives, mutually exclusive. Among a number of blacks, particularly
those whose experience with or distrust of the criminal justice system was such that they tended to discount
the fact that five of six defendants had to varying degrees admitted taking part in the attack, and to focus
instead on the absence of any supporting forensic evidence incontrovertibly linking this victim to these
defendants, the case could be read as a confirmation not only of their victimization but of the white
conspiracy they saw at the heart of that victimization. For The Amsterdam News, which did not veer
automatically to the radical analysis (a typical recent issue lauded the FBI for its minority recruiting and the
Harlem National Guard for its high morale and readiness to go to the Gulf), the defendants could in this
light be seen as victims of “a political trial,” of a “legal lynching,” of a case “rigged from the very
beginning” by the decision of “the white press” that “whoever was arrested and charged in this case of the
attempted murder, rape and sodomy of a well-connected, bright, beautiful and promising white woman was
guilty, pure and simple.”
For Alton H. Maddox, Jr., the message to be drawn from the case was that the American criminal
justice system, which was under any circumstances “inherently and unabashedly racist,” failed “to function
equitably at any level when a Black male is accused of raping a white female.” For others the message was
more general, and worked to reinforce the fragile but functional mythology of an heroic black past, the
narrative in which European domination could be explained as a direct and vengeful response to African
superiority. “Today the white man is faced head on with what is happening on the Black Continent,
Africa,” Malcolm X wrote.
Look at the artifacts being discovered there, that are proving over and over again, how the black
man had great, fine, sensitive civilizations before the white man was out of the caves. Below the Sahara, in
the places where most of America’s Negroes’ foreparents were kidnapped, there is being unearthed some of
the finest craftsmanship, sculpture and other objects, that has ever been seen by modern man. Some of
these things now are on view in such places as New York City’s Museum of Modern Art. Gold work of
such fine tolerance and workmanship that it has no rival. Ancient objects produced by black
hands…refined by those black hands with results that no human hand today can equal.
History has been so “whitened” by the white man that even the black professors have known little
more than the most ignorant black man about the talents and rich civilizations and cultures of the black man
of millenniums ago….
“Our proud African queen,” the Reverend Al Sharpton had said of Tawana Brawley’s mother,
Glenda Brawley: “She stepped out of anonymity, stepped out of obscurity, and walked into history.” It was
said in the corridors of the courthouse where Yusef Salaam was tried that he carried himself “like an
African king.”
“It makes no difference anymore whether the attack on Tawana happened,” William Kunstler had
told New York Newsday when the alleged rape and torture of Tawana Brawley by a varying number of
white police officers seemed, as an actual prosecutable crime if not as a window on what people needed to
believe, to have dematerialized. “If her story was a concoction to prevent her parents from punishing her
for staying out all night, that doesn’t disguise the fact that a lot of young black women are treated the way
she said she was treated.” The importance of whether or not the crime had occurred was, in this view,
entirely resident in the crime’s “description,” which was defined by Stanley Diamond in The Nation as “a
crime that did not occur” but was “described with skill and controlled hysteria by the black actors as the
epitome of degradation, a repellent model of what actually happens to too many black women.”
A good deal of what got said around the edges of the jogger case, in the corridors and on the callin shows, seemed to derive exclusively from the suspicions of conspiracy increasingly entrenched among
those who believe themselves powerless. A poll conducted in June 1990 by The New York Times and
WCBS-TV News determined that 77 percent of blacks polled believed either that it was “true” or “might
possibly be true” (as opposed to “almost certainly not true”) that the government of the United States
“singles out and investigates black elected officials in order to discredit them in a way it doesn’t do with
white officials.” Sixty percent believed that it was true or might possibly be true that the government
“deliberately makes sure that drugs are easily available in poor black neighborhoods in order to harm black
people.” Twenty-nine percent believed that it was true or might possibly be true that “the virus which
causes AIDS was deliberately created in a laboratory in order to infect black people.” In each case, the
alternative response to “true” or “might possibly be true” was “almost certainly not true,” which might have
seemed in itself to reflect a less than ringing belief in the absence of conspiracy. “The conspiracy to destroy
Black boys is very complex and interwoven,” Jawanza Kunjufu, a Chicago educational consultant, wrote in
his Countering the Conspiracy to Destroy Black Boys, a 1982 pamphlet which has since been extended to
three volumes.
There are many contributors to the conspiracy, ranging from the very visible who are more
obvious, to the less visible and silent partners who are more difficult to recognize.
Those people who adhere to the doctrine of white racism, imperialism, and white male supremacy are
easier to recognize. Those people who actively promote drugs and gang violence are active conspirators,
and easier to identify. What makes the conspiracy more complex are those people who do not plot together
to destroy Black boys, but, through their indifference, perpetuate it. This passive group of conspirators
consists of parents, educators, and white liberals who deny being racists, but through their silence allow
institutional racism to continue.
For those who proceeded from the conviction that there was underway a conspiracy to destroy
blacks, particularly black boys, a belief in the innocence of these defendants, a conviction that even their
own statements had been rigged against them or wrenched from them, followed logically. It was in the
corridors and on the call-in shows that the conspiracy got sketched in, in a series of fantasy details that
conflicted not only with known facts but even with each other. It was said that the prosecution was
withholding evidence that the victim had gone to the park to meet a drug dealer. It was said, alternately or
concurrently, that the prosecution was withholding evidence that the victim had gone to the park to take
part in a satanic ritual. It was said that the forensic photographs showing her battered body were not “real”
photographs, that “they,” the prosecution, had “brought in some corpse for the pictures.” It was said that the
young woman who appeared on the witness stand and identified herself as the victim was not the “real”
victim, that “they” had in this case brought in an actress.
What was being expressed in each instance was the sense that secrets must be in play, that “they,”
the people who had power in the courtroom, were in possession of information systematically withheld—
since information itself was power—from those who did not have power. On the day the first three
defendants were sentenced, C. Vernon Mason, who had formally entered the case in the penalty phase as
Antron McCray’s attorney, filed a brief which included the bewildering and untrue assertion that the
victim’s boyfriend, who had not at that time been called to testify, was black. That some whites jumped to
engage this assertion on its own terms (the Daily News columnist Gail Collins referred to it as Mason’s
“slimiest argument of the hour—an announcement that the jogger had a black lover”) tended only to
reinforce the sense of racial estrangement that was the intended subtext of the assertion, which was without
meaning or significance except in that emotional deep where whites are seen as conspiring in secret to sink
blacks in misery. “Just answer me, who got addicted?” I recall one black spectator asking another as they
left the courtroom. “I’ll tell you who got addicted, the inner city got addicted.” He had with him a pamphlet
that laid out a scenario in which the government had conspired to exterminate blacks by flooding their
neighborhoods with drugs, a scenario touching all the familiar points, Laos, Cambodia, the Golden
Triangle, the CIA, more secrets, more poetry.
“From the beginning I have insisted that this was not a racial case,” Robert Morgenthau, the
Manhattan district attorney, said after the verdicts came in on the first jogger trial. He spoke of those who,
in his view, wanted “to divide the races and advance their own private agendas,” and of how the city was
“ill-served” by those who had so “sought to exploit” this case. “We had hoped that the racial tensions
surrounding the jogger trial would begin to dissipate soon after the jury arrived at a verdict,” a Post
editorial began a few days later. The editorial spoke of an “ugly claque of ‘activists,’ ” of the “divisive
atmosphere” they had created, and of the anticipation with which the city’s citizens had waited for
“mainstream black leaders” to step forward with praise for the way in which the verdicts had brought New
York “back from the brink of criminal chaos”:
Alas, in the jogger case, the wait was in vain. Instead of praise for a verdict which demonstrated
that sometimes criminals are caught and punished, New Yorkers heard charlatans like the Rev. Al Sharpton
claim the case was fixed. They heard that C. Vernon Mason, one of the engineers of the Tawana Brawley
hoax—the attorney who thinks Mayor Dinkins wears “too many yarmulkes”—was planning to appeal the
verdicts….
To those whose preferred view of the city was of an inherently dynamic and productive
community ordered by the natural play of its conflicting elements, enriched, as in Mayor Dinkins’s
“gorgeous mosaic,” by its very “contrasts,” this case offered a number of useful elements. There was the
confirmation of “crime” as the canker corroding the life of the city. There was, in the random and feral
evening described by the East Harlem attackers and the clear innocence of and damage done to the Upper
East Side and Wall Street victim, an eerily exact and conveniently personalized representation of what the
Daily News had called “the rape and the brutalization of a city.” Among the reporters on this case, whose
own narrative conventions involved “hero cops” and “brave prosecutors” going hand to hand against
“crime” (the SECRET AGONY OF JOGGER D.A., we learned in the Post a few days after the verdicts in
the first trial, was that “Brave Prosecutor’s Marriage Failed as She Put Rapists Away”), there seemed an
unflagging enthusiasm for the repetition and reinforcement of these elements, and an equally unflagging
resistance, even hostility, to exploring the point of view of the defendants’ families and friends and
personal or political allies (or, as they were called in news reports, the “supporters”) who gathered daily at
the other end of the corridor from the courtroom.
This was curious. Criminal cases are widely regarded by American reporters as windows on the
city or culture in which they take place, opportunities to enter not only households but parts of the culture
normally closed, and yet this was a case in which indifference to the world of the defendants extended even
to the reporting of names and occupations. Yusef Salaam’s mother, who happened to be young and
photogenic and to have European features, was pictured so regularly that she and her son became the
instantly recognizable “images” of Jogger One, but even then no one got her name quite right. For a while
in the papers she was “Cheroney,” or sometimes “Cheronay,” McEllhonor, then she became Cheroney
McEllhonor Salaam. After she testified the spelling of her first name was corrected to “Sharonne,”
although, since the byline on a piece she wrote for The Amsterdam News spelled it differently, “Sharrone,”
this may have been another misunderstanding. Her occupation was frequently given as “designer” (later,
after her son’s conviction, she went to work as a paralegal for William Kunstler), but no one seemed to take
this seriously enough to say what she designed or for whom; not until after she testified, when Newsday
reported her testimony that on the evening of her son’s arrest she had arrived at the precinct house late
because she was an instructor at the Parsons School of Design, did the notion of “designer” seem
sufficiently concrete to suggest an actual occupation.
The Jogger One defendants were referred to repeatedly in the news columns of the Post as
“thugs.” The defendants and their families were often said by reporters to be “sneering.” (The reporters, in
turn, were said at the other end of the corridor to be “smirking.”) “We don’t have nearly so strong a
question as to the guilt or innocence of the defendants as we did at Bensonhurst,” a Newsday reporter
covering the first jogger trial said to The New York Observer, well before the closing arguments, by way of
explaining why Newsday‘s coverage may have seemed less extensive on this trial than on the Bensonhurst
trials. “There is not a big question as to what happened in Central Park that night. Some details are missing,
but it’s fairly clear who did what to whom.”
In fact this came close to the heart of it: that it seemed, on the basis of the videotaped statements,
fairly clear who had done what to whom was precisely the case’s liberating aspect, the circumstance that
enabled many of the city’s citizens to say and think what they might otherwise have left unexpressed.
Unlike other recent high-visibility cases in New York, unlike Bensonhurst and unlike Howard Beach and
unlike Bernhard Goetz, here was a case in which the issue not exactly of race but of an increasingly visible
underclass could be confronted by the middle class, both white and black, without guilt. Here was a case
which gave this middle class a way to transfer and express what had clearly become a growing and
previously inadmissible rage with the city’s disorder, with the entire range of ills and uneasy guilts that
came to mind in a city where entire families slept in the discarded boxes in which new Sub-Zero
refrigerators were delivered, at twentysix hundred per, to more affluent families. Here was also a case, most
significantly, in which even that transferred rage could be transferred still further, veiled, personalized: a
case in which the city’s distress could be seen to derive not precisely from its underclass but instead from
certain identifiable individuals who claimed to speak for this underclass, individuals who, in Robert
Morgenthau’s words, “sought to exploit” this case, to “advance their own private agendas”; individuals
who wished even to “divide the races.”
If the city’s problems could be seen as deliberate disruptions of a naturally cohesive and
harmonious community, a community in which, undisrupted, “contrasts” generated a perhaps dangerous
but vital “energy,” then those problems were tractable, and could be addressed, like “crime,” by the call for
“better leadership.” Considerable comfort could be obtained, given this storyline, through the demonization
of the Reverend Al Sharpton, whose presence on the edges of certain criminal cases that interested him had
a polarizing effect that tended to reinforce the narrative. Jim Sleeper, in The Closest of Strangers, described
one of the fifteen marches Sharpton led through Bensonhurst after the 1989 killing of an East New York
sixteen-year-old, Yusuf Hawkins, who had come into Bensonhurst and been set upon, with baseball bats
and ultimately with bullets, by a group of young whites.
An August 27, 1989, Daily News photo of the Reverend Al Sharpton and a claque of black
teenagers marching in Bensonhurst to protest Hawkins’s death shows that they are not really “marching.”
They are stumbling along, huddled together, heads bowed under the storm of hatred breaking over them,
eyes wide, hanging on to one another and to Sharpton, scared out of their wits. They, too, are innocents—or
were until that day, which they will always remember. And because Sharpton is with them, his head bowed,
his face showing that he knows what they’re feeling, he is in the hearts of black people all over New York.
Yet something is wrong with this picture. Sharpton did not invite or coordinate with Bensonhurst
community leaders who wanted to join the march. Without the time for organizing which these leaders
should have been given in order to rein in the punks who stood waving watermelons; without an effort by
black leaders more reputable than Sharpton to recruit whites citywide and swell the march, Sharpton was
assured that the punks would carry the day. At several points he even baited them by blowing kisses….
“I knew that Bensonhurst would clarify whether it had been a racial incident or not,” Sharpton said by way
of explaining, on a recent Frontline documentary, his strategy in Bensonhurst. “The fact that I was so
controversial to Bensonhurst helped them forget that the cameras were there,” he said. “So I decided to help
them…I would throw kisses to them, and they would go nuts.” Question, began a joke often told in the
aftermath of the first jogger trial. You’re in a room with Hitler, Saddam Hussein, and Al Sharpton. You
have only two bullets. Who do you shoot? Answer: Al Sharpton. Twice.
Sharpton did not exactly fit the roles New York traditionally assigns, for maximum audience
comfort, to prominent blacks. He seemed in many ways a phantasm, someone whose instinct for the
connections between religion and politics and show business was so innate that he had been all his life the
vessel for other people’s hopes and fears. He had given his first sermon at age four. He was touring with
Mahalia Jackson at eleven. As a teenager, according to Robert D. McFadden, Ralph Blumenthal, M. A.
Farber, E. R. Shipp, Charles Strum, and Craig Wolff, the New York Times reporters and editors who
collaborated on Outrage: The Story Behind the Tawana Brawley Hoax, Sharpton was tutored first by Adam
Clayton Powell, Jr. (“You got to know when to hit it and you got to know when to quit it and when it’s
quittin’ time, don’t push it,” Powell told him), then by the Reverend Jesse Jackson (“Once you turn on the
gas, you got to cook or burn ‘em up,” Jackson told him), and eventually, after obtaining a grant from
Bayard Rustin and campaigning for Shirley Chisholm, by James Brown. “Once, he trailed Brown down a
corridor, through a door, and, to his astonishment, onto a stage flooded with spotlights,” the authors of
Outrage reported. “He immediately went into a wiggle and dance.”
It was perhaps this talent for seizing the spotlight and the moment, this fatal bent for the wiggle
and the dance, that most clearly disqualified Sharpton from casting as the Good Negro, the credit to the
race, the exemplary if often imagined figure whose refined manners and good grammar could be stressed
and who could be seen to lay, as Jimmy Walker said of Joe Louis, “a rose on the grave of Abraham
Lincoln.” It was left, then, to cast Sharpton, and for Sharpton to cast himself, as the Outrageous Nigger, the
familiar role—assigned sixty years ago to Father Divine and thirty years later to Adam Clayton Powell—of
the essentially manageable fraud whose first concern is his own well-being. It was for example repeatedly
mentioned, during the ten days the jury was out on the first jogger trial, that Sharpton had chosen to wait
out the verdict not at 111 Centre Street but “in the air-conditioned comfort” of C. Vernon Mason’s office,
from which he could be summoned by beeper.
Sharpton, it was frequently said by whites and also by some blacks, “represented nobody,” was
“self-appointed” and “self-promoting.” He was an “exploiter” of blacks, someone who “did them more
harm than good.” It was pointed out that he had been indicted by the state of New York in June of 1989 on
charges of income tax evasion and grand larceny. (He was ultimately acquitted of the larceny charges; the
tax evasion charge is pending.) It was pointed out that New York Newsday, working on information that
appeared to have been supplied by federal law enforcement agencies, had in January 1988 named him as a
federal informant, and that he himself admitted to having let the government tap his phone in a drugenforcement effort. It was routinely said, most tellingly of all in a narrative based on the magical ability of
“leaders” to improve the common weal, that he was “not the right leader,” “not at all the leader the black
community needs.” His clothes and his demeanor were ridiculed (my husband was asked by Esquire to do a
piece predicated on interviewing Sharpton while he was having his hair processed), his motives derided and
his tactics, which were those of an extremely sophisticated player who counted being widely despised
among his stronger cards, not very well understood.
Whites tended to believe, and to say, that Sharpton was “using” the racial issue—which, in the
sense that all political action is based on “using” one issue or another, he clearly was. Whites also tended to
see him as destructive and irresponsible, indifferent to the truth or to the sensibilities of whites—which,
most notoriously in the nurturing of the Tawana Brawley case, a primal fantasy in which white men were
accused of a crime Sharpton may well have known to be a fabrication, he also clearly was. What seemed
not at all understood was that for Sharpton, who had no interest in making the problem appear more
tractable (“The question is, do you want to ‘ease’ it or do you want to ‘heal’ it,” he had said when asked if
his marches had not worked against “easing tension” in Bensonhurst), the fact that blacks and whites could
sometimes be shown to have divergent interests by no means suggested the need for an ameliorative
solution. Such divergent interests were instead a lucky break, a readymade organizing tool, a dramatic
illustration of who had the power and who did not, who was making it and who was falling below the line;
a metaphor for the sense of victimization felt not only by blacks but by all those Sharpton called “the leftout opposition.” We got the power, the chants go on “Sharpton and Fulani in Babylon: volume 1 the battle
of New York City,” a tape of the speeches of Sharpton and of Leonora Fulani, a leader of the New Alliance
party. We are the chosen people. Out of the pain. We that can’t even talk together. Have learned to walk
together.
“I’m no longer sure what I thought about Al Sharpton a year or two ago still applies,” Jerry
Nachman, the editor of The New York Post, who had frequently criticized Sharpton, told Howard Kurtz of
The Washington Post in September 1990. “I spent a lot of time on the street. There’s a lot of anger, a lot of
frustration. Rightly or wrongly, he may be articulating a great deal more of what typical attitudes are than
some of us thought.” Wilbert Tatum, the editor and publisher of the Amsterdam News, tried to explain to
Kurtz how, in his view, Sharpton had been cast as “a caricature of black leadership”:
He was fat. He wore jogging suits. He wore a medallion and gold chains. And the unforgivable of
unforgivables, he had processed hair. The white media, perhaps not consciously, said, “We’re going to
promote this guy because we can point up the ridiculousness and paucity of black leadership.”
Al understood precisely what they were doing, precisely. Al is probably the most brilliant tactician this
country has ever produced….
Whites often mentioned, as a clinching argument, that Sharpton paid his demonstrators to appear;
the figure usually mentioned was five dollars (by November 1990, when Sharpton was fielding
demonstrators to protest the killing of a black woman alleged to have grabbed a police nightstick in the
aftermath of a domestic dispute, a police source quoted in the Post had jumped the payment to twenty
dollars), but the figure floated by a prosecutor on the jogger case was four dollars. This seemed on many
levels a misunderstanding, or an estrangement, or as blacks would say a disrespect, too deep to address, but
on its simplest level it served to suggest what value was placed by whites on what they thought of as black
time.
In the fall of 1990, the fourth and fifth of the six defendants in the Central Park attack, Kevin
Richardson and Kharey Wise, went on trial. Since this particular narrative had achieved full resolution, or
catharsis, with the conviction of the first three defendants, the city’s interest in the case had by then largely
waned. Those “charlatans” who had sought to “exploit” the case had been whisked, until they could next
prove useful, into the wings. Even the verdicts in this second trial, coinciding as they did with the most
recent arrest of John (the Dapper Don) Gotti, a reliable favorite on the New York stage, did not lead the
local news. It was in fact the economy itself that had come center stage in the city’s new, and yet familiar,
narrative work: a work in which the vital yet beleaguered city would or would not weather yet another
“crisis” (the answer was a resounding yes); a work, or a dreamwork, that emphasized not only the cyclical
nature of such “crises” but the regenerative power of the city’s “contrasts.” “With its migratory population,
its diversity of cultures and institutions, and its vast resources of infrastructure, capital, and intellect, New
York has been the quintessential modern city for more than a century, constantly reinventing itself,”
Michael Stone concluded in his New York magazine cover story, “Hard Times.” “Though the process may
be long and painful, there’s no reason to believe it won’t happen again.”
These were points commonly made in support of a narrative that tended, with its dramatic line of
“crisis” and resolution, or recovery, only to further obscure the economic and historical groundwork for the
situation in which the city found itself: that long unindictable conspiracy of criminal and semi-criminal
civic and commercial arrangements, deals, negotiations, gimmes and getmes, graft and grift, pipe, topsoil,
concrete, garbage; the conspiracy of those in the know, those with a connection, those with a friend at the
Department of Sanitation or the Buildings Department or the School Construction Authority or Foley
Square, the conspiracy of those who believed everybody got upside down because of who it was, it
happened to anybody else, a summons gets issued, and that’s the end of it. On November 12, 1990, in its
page-one analysis of the city’s troubles, The New York Times went so far as to locate, in “public spending,”
not the drain on the city’s vitality and resources it had historically been but “an important positive factor”:
Not in decades has so much money gone for public works in the area—airports, highways, bridges, sewers,
subways and other projects. Roughly $12 billion will be spent in the metropolitan region in the current
fiscal year. Such government outlays are a healthy counterforce to a 43 percent decline since 1987 in the
value of new private construction, a decline related to the sharp drop in real estate prices…. While nearly
every industry in the private sector has been reducing payrolls since spring, government hiring has risen,
maintaining an annual growth rate of 20,000 people since 1987….
That there might well be, in a city in which the proliferation of and increase in taxes were already
driving private-sector payrolls out of town, hardly anyone left to tax for such public works and publicsector jobs was a point not too many people wished seriously to address: among the citizens of a New York
come to grief on the sentimental stories told in defense of its own lazy criminality, the city’s inevitability
remained the given, the heart, the first and last word on which all the stories rested. We love New York, the
narrative promises, because it matches our energy level.
Letters
'Sentimental Journeys' March 7, 1991
1. *
William R. Taylor, "The Launching of a Commercial Culture: New York City, 1860–1930," in
John Hull Mollenkopf's Power, Culture, and Place: Essays on New York City (Russell Sage
Foundation, 1988), pp. 107–133.↩